I have a relative who has been terrified of the Internet for years. Two decades ago, he was a heavy CompuServe user. Now, he only goes online at the library. But even he can’t escape. The Internet is everywhere now. It is in cars, on TV. It connects to medical devices, to toys (Barbie). It flies on airplanes, touches the power grid.

The year’s biggest hack was of the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management. It exposed sensitive personal information from job applications, including of intelligence and military employees with security clearances. In all, 21.5 million people were potentially affected, 5.6 million sets of fingerprints obtained. The authors were Chinese, though Beijing claimed the hack was NOT state-sponsored. They told U.S. officials the culprits were arrested, @nakashimae reported, but provided no further information.

Silicon Valley has resisted the idea, and rightly so. Tim Cook of Apple emerged as its most passionate, articulate voice on how encryption and digital privacy are essential to our First Amendment rights and should not be sacrificed to satisfy the Department of Homeland Security.

“If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too. Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it,” Cook said in June. Weakening encryption makes no sense, he said. “The bad guys will still encrypt; it’s easy to do and readily available.”